Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to certified confidential data collaboration using blockchains.
Discussion of the Background
The bulk of communication, commerce and collaboration requires confidentiality. Confidential collaboration today is plagued by massive inefficiencies, lack of visibility, plausible deniability, data fragmentation, inconsistent data and the like. For example, consider a doctor writing a prescription. The doctor is the source-of-truth for the prescription which is considered confidential. In the prior art, there are two ways this is done. The doctor could write a prescription and physically hand it to the patient. The patient might take the prescription to a pharmacy. The pharmacy might accept the prescription based written on a certain type of paper or might verify the prescription by calling the doctor to confirm that the doctor had written the prescription. Alternatively, the doctor might ask the patient which pharmacy they wish to utilize. The doctor could then relay the prescription to the pharmacy via without limitation a fax machine. The patient could then go to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription once it is filled. However, the prescription could easily have been lost, with the doctor claiming it was sent and the pharmacy claiming it was never received. The prescription could also be an incorrect, with the prescription containing incorrect dosage, duration or the like. As this example illustrates, there exists inefficiencies and specialized scheme requirements in the prior art for such a collaboration to function. The introduction of errors, confusion, plausible deniability and the like are possible.
A key element of this type of collaboration is that it is confidential and involves more than two parties. As detailed above, simple confidential three-party scenarios involving confidential collaboration are fraught with numerous problems. With the introduction of additional parties, the possibility of confusion, plausible deniability, back-and-forth and the duration necessitated by the collaboration, increases exponentially. For example, assume that the pharmacy calls an insurance company for authorization of the prescription and that the insurance company declines to authorize the prescription for some reason. The pharmacy might then inform the patient of the non-authorization of the prescription by the insurance company. The patient may be required to call the doctor to amend the prescription in some way and the doctor might amend the prescription based on this new information, starting the whole process again. Importantly, in this example, there may be inaccuracies in the relayed information from the pharmacy to the patient and from the patient to the doctor. The introduction of an additional party, the insurance company, increases the possibility of confusion, plausible deniability, back-and-forth, and the duration necessitated by the collaboration. The duration necessitated by the collaboration can easily take weeks to conclude.
Blockchains are known in the prior art which may be used to collaborate in situations where the collaboration is not confidential, such as with some simple Smart Contracts. These types of non-confidential collaborations are also referred to herein as transparent collaborations. Unfortunately, blockchains known in the prior art cannot be used as the sole mechanism for confidential communication and collaboration without some significant compromises.
There are several impediments to using blockchains as the sole mechanism for confidential communication and collaboration today. These include without limitation, scale issues relating to the message size, scale issues relating to the transaction rate, confidentiality issues, orphaned block issues, and the like.
The size of the content of a message can easily be tens to hundreds of megabytes. Most blockchains known in the prior art have transaction sizes in the kilobytes, which is three orders of magnitude too small. For example, the average Ethereum transaction size as of November 2017 is less than 1 KB.
Blockchains known in the prior art can scale to tens of transactions per second, which is entirely too low a transaction rate. While there are proposals to scale blockchain transaction rates using approaches like Lightning Networks (Bitcoin) and Raiden (Ethereum), these approaches only scale highly specific payment transaction rates. Approaches to general transaction scalability like Ethereum Plasma are still in the research stage at this time.
Blockchains known in the prior art lack confidentiality and are inherently transparent. Approaches to add confidentiality to blockchains include zero-knowledge proofs, secure hardware enclaves and partitioning-as-a-means-of-confidentiality. Zero-knowledge proofs are not fully ready as a general-purpose solution for confidentiality. There are significant limitations in the types of operations they can handle. Secure hardware enclave approaches like Microsoft CoCo are still in the research phase. Partitioning-based confidentiality approaches like hyperledger fabric channels are limiting. For example, there is no partition that can encompass a dynamic-chain-of-trust. By definition, a dynamic-chain-of-trust forms a graph structure across potentially millions of users that cannot be partitioned.
There also exist orphaned block issues in the prior art. Parties cannot be sure that that a block will not eventually be orphaned at the time a block is added to the blockchain. For example, assume that a message is sent from party1 to party2 and captured in blockN. Later, party2 forwards that message to party3 and that transaction is then captured on blockN+1. It is possible that blockN and blockN+1 will eventually get orphaned. This effectively causes a cascading series of rollbacks. However, the parties may have already taken off-chain actions corresponding to the two transactions that cannot be undone. For example, assume that a doctor C-sends a prescription to a patient who then C-forwards it to the pharmacy. If these two transactions end up on orphaned blocks, they can be interpreted as them being rolled back. However, the prescription may have already been filled. For blockchains like Bitcoin this is usually overcome by waiting for some number of confirmations before the probability of rollback becomes negligible. This approach makes dependent transactions fraught with problems.
Referring to FIG. 1B, a chart illustrating illustrating that in the prior art, the complexity of an exemplary collaboration increases as the number of collaborating parties increases, is shown. Graph element 54 represents the number of parties involved in the collaboration, which as shown ranges from 2 to 4 parties. Graph element 52 represents the complexity of the collaboration, including without limitation, the degree potential confusion, plausible deniability, time and back-and-forth necessitated by the collaboration, and the like. As shown, in general, as the number of parties in a confidential collaboration increases, the degree potential confusion, plausible deniability, time and back-and-forth as represented by line 56 rises exponentially.
Postal certified mail is known in the prior art. The venerable postal certified mail has long been a staple of certified commerce. However, there are several major problems associated with postal certified mail. The biggest problem is that postal certified mail knows nothing about the content, but rather only its container, the envelope. Postal certified mail is also slow and non-digital, making it very hard and inefficient to integrate into today's digital world.
Email is also known in the prior art. Email is one of the most successful general communication and collaboration tools in existence and is used extensively by businesses. However, email has many deiniciencies with respect to collaboration. Specifically, email does not support an agreed-upon single version of the truth, the content can be tampered with, the identity can be tampered with, timestamps can be tampered with, it is repudiable, and is generally not truly confidential. Despite its deficiencies, there are no viable general purpose alternatives in the prior art for communication and collaboration. Because email includes the above deficiencies, there is a substantial human element involved in the interpreting, discovering, compensating and litigating, to allow certification characteristics to be partially extracted.
File Sharing is known in the prior art and used for collaboration. However, file sharing content can be tampered with and changes are repudiable. File Sharing is not a suitable candidate for certified communication and collaboration.
Notaries are known in the prior art. However, notaries do not enable communication and collaboration directly, but instead provide useful building block services such as various forms of attestation.
Biased collaboration systems are known in the prior art. In this context, the term biased refers to the characteristic that one of the parties to the communication and collaboration is considered an authoritative party. The greater the size asymmetry between the parties, the more likely it is for this model to be employed. For example, in business-to-consumer (“B2C”) scenarios, the “B” side will often represent the system of truth. This means that weaker parties often have no choice but to rely on whims of the stronger party. For example, an ecommerce provider may claim that a consumer never placed an order and the consumer has no choice to accept this or get into some sort of customer service escalation with uncertain outcomes. Biased collaboration systems become even more problematic when the size disparity between parties is not so dramatic, such as business-to-business (“B2B”) scenarios. This often results in a system where each party has its own biased system. Now the question becomes, whose reality is definitive. In a two-party relationship, the parties could in theory agree that a particular party's reality is authoritative. For multi-party collaborations, even this becomes impossible to achieve. So, these systems tend to be artificially segmented into pairwise relationships, making even the simplest multi-party collaborations highly complex.
Neutral, specialized collaboration systems are known in the prior art. Examples of these systems include without limitation Uber for ride sharing, eBay for auctioning, eSignature systems for document signing and the like. However, these systems are highly specialized systems for highly specialized use cases, require trust with a neutral party, and do not support dynamic chain-of-trust.
The present invention overcomes these and other limitations associated with certified confidential data collaboration.